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ENGLISH VERSION:

An applause to Logos Edizioni that kindly sent me a promo copy to write a review about the eleventh book from Chilean author and illustrator Claudio Andrés Salvador Francisco Romo Torres, the second for Modena's small indie publishing company.
Romo has also been a drawing, engraving, illustration and image telling teacher at Chile's Concepcion's university since 1997.

The new literary effort came out in 2016 in a format slightly smaller than A4, it's in colour, with a stiff cover, and even by only giving a look at the front and back of the cover or glancing at the inner pictures one immediately understands that Romo is strongly in debt not only to Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Francisco Coloane, but also to the style of Hyeronimus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer and all the bestial medieval imagery, as well as contemporary authors such as Hornst Janssen, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Otto Dix, German expressionists, comic illustrators Enrique, Alberto and Patricia Breccia and Moebius; with the world of extreme Metal covers and artworks parallelisms with Nuclear Death's artworks and similar bands' pop out from my mind.

While the author used a white pencil on a black background for the inner drawings, for the outer ones - all different except four - Romo utilized pastel and watercolours in a sublime and hugely detailed way, adding only the previously computer-drawn rays and the title in the cover. All the rest remains rigororously analogic, that is handmade.
The tale accompanying the reader, translated by Federico Taibi, is the one of an unspecified entity called Apparitio Albinus, who owns a garden populated by spirits of hybrid animal-vegetal-mechanical creatures.

The first drawing, "The source", depicts a miraculous chalice allowing those who dive into it to rejuvanate; yet unfortunately, a jealous god turns people getting out of the chalice into vegetal mutants, for instance a woman with a rose instead of her head. The flasks, of which one gifted with paws like many other objects present in the next pages, and the chalice contain a grave perspective mistake well visible in the incorrect ellipses which is partly forgiven thanks to the marvellous array of nuances and a choice of colours like azure, green and orange in tones which always strike the beholder's eye. Moreover, it must be mentioned the remarkable patience lavished to define with the pencil the motifs present on the chalice, and the bricks of the cylindrical furnace on the right.

"The giant automaton" is the following drawing, in which you see a mastodontic robot armed in an Arab manner, which left the Muslim army it was enrolled with because tired of violence and innocent victims on account of fire weapons. Therefore it's about a machine having feelings, and consequently owns without explanations an unexpected human side. It prays Allah to be pitiful to him, and has decided to become a bird shelter inside Albinus's serene Mediterranean garden, kissed by a sunset or dawn. We can only guess that Albinus is the tiny man placed on the low right side of the drawing observing the robot.

Introduced by a brief passage written by William Blake, the third drawing titled "The ovens with deep roots" stands out, displaying giant ovens made of bricks with vaguely human faces, arms starting from their necks branding scimitars, and placed on hills constituting their own bodies, which are nothing but a set of cemetaries supplied with smoking chimneys; people get into them, they go down until they reach their loculi waiting for them with their names already engraved. Terrifically appreciable are the pupils made of skulls, whereas the dry branches filling the scenery have the additional function of separating the monstruous stoves.

"The phantasmagorical machine" regards a camerasupplied with an eye globe and cables projecting the image of a friend grown deformed owing to prolonged exposure. In time Albinus and his friend have understood that the photos stole a person's soul and flesh, reducing bodies to ectoplasmatic matter and actually leading them to death.
Two aspects to notice are that despite the fact that the friend's consistency is by now only ethereal, his hearts and veins are still clearly visible, and secondly that the friend has an excrescence on his head similar to a trton's crest; such a motif is fairly recurrent in several drawings in the pages to come.

On the trail of Fremens in the deserted planet Arrakis, "The mechanical arachnids" sees as protagonists some very small men divided by religion and in particular by the myths of creation, further differentiated into nomad clans living on mobile city-states, which are nothing but the iron spiders themselves that they use to hunt. Around them everything is gigantic, and even the mushrooms and the grass are taller than the spiders.

Just as the title suggests, "Flavia, the writing gynoid", portrays a female-looking automaton writing books about the stories of the civilties she used to live by, all gone by now.
She was planned to build a mechanical humanity devoid of monotheisms, even if we have to state precisely that she belonged to the Mayans for some time, and the Mayans, like all pre-Columbian civilties were well-known to be politheists. Once again praise needs to be given to the patience of Job had to sketch the rose-garden behind the gynoid, but also to the feathers stuck into its headgear, as well as the two skulls in the library, one alien and one humanoid.

But the masterpiece of the album is in my opinion "The time machine", a chronoship conceived to explore the mysteries of matter and the future of its builder's existence, which in the end finishes by letting 7 naked corpses out (and not eight as stated in the translation). The constructor recognizes himself in thise old bodies and deduces they come from the future to warn him not to use the machine anymore, notwithstanding the machine can't be destroyed because of an arcane power, least of all the lab containing it. The morale is thus dual: on one hand it deals with an exhortation not to waste the little time granted, on the other hand it is reminded that death arrives inexorably for everybody. Those following Death Metal must have noticed for sure a strong similarity to the bodies appearing in the cover of Bloodbath's "The fathomless mastery".

One of the few drawings in an oval shape, "The insects", tells, instead, about beings which are halfway between two-footed pupae of a butterfly and magnolia stamens blending each other to perfection on 23 September every year on the oceanic coasts of the planet Solaris. One of them has just laid four eggs in a remote corner of the garden, and there is also another drawing immediately after that schematizes it in three parts using the classical sepia colour.

Millenary-looking and taking part in the cosmogonic creation of suns and planets, "The demiurge" is a head with six pairs of eys feeding human beings with its nuclear fluid, warming them with fire coming out of a hole-vortex it has on its head, gives them intelligence and maybe its life. In addition to the fire it's supplied with a tube providing with energy two conical flasks containing a man and a woman, both unconscious; their heads are bristling with points and they have very short and small arms. It is hard to interpret the drawing, being one of the most cryptic ones and bound to various exegeses, and it has an aura of artificial ageing given by the colour of the paper chosen.

The points on the head we've just seen are conspicously similar to "The mandrake", a two-footed plant.root with a pair of shoes, particular frequent in the south-American artist's opera; it was born from the seed of a condemned person, and flees not to be killed. Actually, the violet broth obtained by its meat purifies blood from toxins, and the plant grows mute not to be found out by its many hunters, aware that its melodious voice (!) might reveal its presence. Here again, for the second time, we are in front of an oval drawing instaed of the typical rectangular one.

Once again Albinus is facing a bizarre creature several times bigger than him; he is shooting it with an old film camera from his garden; it's "The alebrije", born of a series of sequencial dreams after strong consumption of drugs, and by nature it can be pleasant or nightmarish. Difficult to say if the one he's confronting is dangerous or not, as well as if it's male or female; what's for sure is that Romo expressed the best of his talent in this drawing. The alebrije showing up here is partly an apple, fish, grasshopper, butterfly and a bit human. The apple composing its face has in fact a vegetal mouth with an array of sharp unreassuring teeth, as well as human cross-eyed eyes, chin, moustache, nose and eyebrows besides the grasshopper's paws (of course wearing shoes); it also has two human skeletal arms carefully laying the eggs that come out of its womb.
Only now the tiny Albinus with its black glasses and short thick beard reveals himself to be Romo himself after confronting the drawing with the photo he posted on his Facebook account.

"The wrestler Lawrence, called 'The incendiary'" is the nth living thing populating Albinus/Romo's enchanted garden. Every wrestler in this place has inhuman powers (psychic, levitating, thermal, etc.). Lawrence can count on an inordinately powerful grip and capacities to spread fire and incinirate the adversary, but the drawing reproduces a wrestler where fire hands come out of its wounds and smoke fists surrounding him, leaned on an active furnace. Is he the furnace or the wrestler? And if he were the wrestler shouldn't he have a fire vortex rather than many small flames exiting his flesh?
In the middle of these riddles that Romo likes to rack our brains with, we're left with the certainty of his pecularities: the fighter has short and small limbs and the background is enriched with briers giving fruit to red berries as already shown previously.

One of the drawings that appears in black and white at the beginning of the book is "The mimoid", one of the countless beasts living in Solaris which formed in the garden after the crash of a comet whose ice core melted. The mimoid is part of Solaris itself, and it's one of the numerous communicative methods the water mass has at its disposal.
What makes a deep impression on me is that the mimoid has multiple roots and red spots that are partially out of the water and partially spread sinking into the ground. I urge you to look attentively at the waves of the ocean to realize how much stroke slowness, precision, and commitment Romo had to dedicate to their carrying out. Claudio's techinque is decidedly at the antipodes to the key characteristics of impressionism.

The ocean of Albinus' s garden is also full of "Giant medusae" connecting tritons' submerged cities with the surface carrying living creatures and goods on their backs or in their bellies. The one in hand is carrying a strange winged fish with arms and legs, which is in turn carrying a dagger under its belt while leaving shallow water (you can plainly see rays, what's more brilliantly drawn, penetrating the water).

("The ichtyo-hitmen" are mercenary fish which had defeated mankind and banned them from the ocean on account of the tritons; now they work for the trtons as incubators of their eggs until they lay them on the mysterious Human Head Island. In the drawing the tritons' babies can be seen exiting the eggs brought by the gish carried by the above-mentioned medusa, and going back to the ocean, under the surveillance of an adult triton. The picture is made more interesting by near arboreous onion-like manufacture similar to Russian kremlins, and also by the daggers that the ichtyo-hitman brings tied under a belt and which are decorated with skulls of the beaten human colonizers, and most of all by a dagger brandished by hand on which an R letter is encarved, not a coincidence for sure!

Being known since ancient times, "The behemoth" is connected with God's concience, and the one that comes into sight her is fitted out with a good deal of eyes - also lateral ones - a fin, a bat's wing, and locust's paws. It's flying and showing up its back formed by a mountain, its anus, its long hairs on the lower side of its body, and finally a toothless mouth.

Then we get to the well-known "Human Head Island", an island made by the head of a crying woman, whose hands emerge from the ocean. This land surrounded by a body of water has roads, a small pier a boat is tied at, and a waterfall that comes out of an ear. Its mouth contains disquieting teeth and the hair tied in side knots are in fact two cities founded on the sea titan's skull, whose inhabitants are all untrustworthy nautical cartographers, as the depicted territories assume the shape of imaginary hybrid animals.

"Aurelia Australis" is instead the name of a levitating city whose environment has been telepathically transformed by its inhabitants, who have had their conscience merged with plants' for generations. The city is so popular that human and alien spacecrafts keep visting it to learn the secrets of its prosperity, the peace reached through meditation and philosophy, and to find answers to questions that they might never have received on their planets of origin.

There exists a very ancient and long-lived immortal alien race that needs no water, navigates exploring the universe meeting alien races and generationg new ones by fertile seeds in dark places of the cosmos where only black holes or old suns are left.
It's "The cosmonauts", creatures with 8 arms conneted in pairs by arteries in common conveying energies and concepts to each other's brain. This is the drawing closer to comic style.

Atanasius Uterinus is a planet orbiting in a nebula among the millions of nebulae present in teh garden of Albinus; it contains a 'sun', as a matter of fact a core heating its inside, which allows life in cities developed in its caves. Moreover, 5 oceans are evidently seeable in the drawing accompanying the description.

The penultimate depiction is attached by a sentence repeated on the back cover of the book, recounting his garden without borders as a fruit of its vivid imagination, and which is linked up with infinite gardens more, that is minds, and one of these is mirroring his; the concept is expressed by a sand-glass, from which we guess that the eden of fantasy belongs to Romo and not God.

The last drawing trace is a stylized self-portrait (in which Romo's head is contained in a diving suit whose glass was accurately rendered by the illustrator's hands) justly followed by his autobiography.

This short book represents for me a happy discovery of an artist I'd never heard of before, of whom I want to further my knowledge of his other opera at the soonest.

MARKUS GANZHERRLICH AND DAUGHTER - 20th June 2019

	Claudio Romo '*Viaggio nel fantasmagorico giardino di Apparitio Albinus / A journey in the phantasmagorical garden of Apparitio Albinus'* (Logos Edizioni) MARK: 80/100



	VERSIONE ITALIANA: Un plauso alla Logos Edizioni, che mi ha gentilmente inviato subito una copia promozionale per poter scrivere la recensione di questo undicesimo libro dell'autore ed illustratore cileno Claudio Andrés Salvador Francisco Romo Torres, il secondo per la piccola casa editrice indipendente di Modena. Romo è anche dal 1997 un insegnante di disegno, incisione, illustrazione e narrazione per immagini presso l'università di Concepcion in Cile. La nuova fatica letteraria esce nel 2016 in un formato leggermente più piccolo dell'A4, è a colori, con copertina rigida, e anche solo guardando il fronte e retro della copertina e sfogliando le illustrazioni interne si capisce immediatamente che Romo è fortemente debitore non solo di Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares e Francisco Coloane, ma pure dello stile di Hyeronimus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer e di tutto l'immaginario bestiale medievale, nonchè di autori contemporanei come Hornst Janssen, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Otto Dix, gli espressionisti tedeschi, o dei fumettisti Enrique, Alberto e Patricia Breccia, e Moebius; con il mondo delle copertine e dell'artwork del Metal estremo vengono in mente parallelismi con gli artworks dei Nuclear Death ed artisti simili. Mentre nei disegni interni l'autore ha usato una matita bianca su uno sfondo nero, in quelli esterni - tutti diversi a parte quattro - Romo ha utilizzato pastello e acquarello in maniera egregia ed estrremamente dettagliata aggiungendo solo nella copertina i raggi ed il titolo, disegnati al computer. Tutto il resto resta rigorosamente analogico, cioè fatto a mano. Il racconto che accompagna il lettore, tradotto da Federico Taibi, è quello di un'entità non precisata chiamata Apparitio Albinus, che possiede un giardino popolato da fantasmi di creature ibride animali-vegetali-meccaniche. Il primo disegno, "La fonte", raffigura un calice miracoloso che consente a chi vi si mmerge di ringiovanire; purtroppo però, un dio geloso tramuta gli uomini che escono dal calice in mutanti vegetali, ad esempio una donna con una rosa al posto della testa. Le beute, di cui una dotata di zampe come molti altri oggetti che si incontrano nelle pagine successive, ed il calice contengono tuttavia un errore madornale di prospettiva ben visibile nelle ellissi imperfette che viene parzialmente perdonato dallo splendido dispiegamento di sfumature e da una scelta di colori come l'azzurro, il verde e l'arancione in tonalità che colpiscono sempre chi le ammira. Va inoltre menzionata l'enorme pazienza profusa nel definire con la matita i motivi presenti sul calice, ed i mattoni della fornace cilindrica a destra. "L'automa gigante" è il disegno seguente, dove si vede un robot mastodontico armato in stile arabo che ha lasciato l'esercito musulmano presso cui era arruolato perchè stanco della violenza e dei morti innocenti a causa delle armi da fuoco. Si tratta quindi di una macchina che prova dei sentimenti, e che perciò possiede inspiegabilmente un lato umano inatteso. Esso prega Allah di essere misericordioso con lui, ed ha deciso di diventare un rifugio per uccelli nel tranquillo giardino mediterraneo di Albinus baciato dal tramonto o dall'alba. Possiamo ipotizzare poi che Albinus sia il piccolo uomo che osserva il robot nella parte bassa destra del disegno. Introdotto da un breve passaggio a firma di William Blake si staglia il terzo disegno intitolato "I forni dalle radici profonde", nel quale forni giganteschi composti da mattoni dal volto vagamente umano, con braccia che partono dal collo impugnando scimitarre, e appoggiati su colline che costituiscono i loro corpi, non sono altro che un insieme di cimiteri dotati di ciminiere fumanti in cui gli uomini che vi entrano scendono poi fino a raggiungere i loculi che li attendono con i loro nomi già incisi. Notevolmente apprezzabili sono le pupille, costituite da teschi, ed i rami secchi che riempiono il paesaggio ed in secondo luogo hanno la funzione di separare i diversi forni. "La macchina fantasmagorica" riguarda una macchina fotografica con globo oculare e cavi che proietta l'immagine di un amico divenuto deforme a causa di un'esposizione prolungata. Col tempo Albinus e l'amico hanno capito che le foto rubavano l'anima alla persona e la carne, riducendo i corpi in materia ectoplasmatica e conducendo di fatto alla morte. Due aspetti da notare sono che malgrado la consistenza dell'amico sia ormai solo eterea, sono comunque ben visibili il suo cuore e le sue vene, ed in seconda battuta che l'amico ha una escrescenza sulla testa simile alla cresta di un tritone; tale motivo è piuttosto frequente in parecchi disegni che si trovano nelle pagine a venire. Sulla scia dei Fremen nel desertico pianeta Arrakis, "Gli aracnidi meccanici" vede come protagonisti dei minuscoli uomini divisi dalla religione ed in particolare dai miti della creazione, ulteriormente differenziatisi in clan nomadi che vivono su città-stato mobili, che altro non sono che gli stessi ragni di ferro che usano per cacciare. Attorno ad essi tutto è enorme, e persino i funghi e l'erba sono più alti dei ragni. Come suggerisce il titolo, "Flavia, la ginoide scrivana" vede disegnata un'automa dalle fattezze femminili che scrive libri a proposito delle storie delle civiltà in cui ha vissuto, tutte scomparse. Lei è stata progettata per costruire un'umanità di tipo meccanico scevra da monoteismi, anche se va precisato che Flavia è appartenuta per un certo periodo ad un sovrano Maya, ed i Maya, come tutte le civiltà precolombiane, erano notoriamente politeisti. Ancora una volta va dato merito alla certosina pazienza nel rappresentare il roseto alle spalle della ginoide, ma anche alle piume conficcate nel copricapo, come pure ai due teschi presenti nella biblioteca, uno alieno ed uno umanoide. Ma il capolavoro del libro è a mio avviso "La macchina del tempo", una crononave concepita per esplorare i misteri della materia e del futuro dell'esistenza del suo costruttore, che però alla fine non fa altro che far uscire sette cadaveri (e non otto come reso nella traduzione) nudi. Il costruttore riconosce se stesso in quei vecchi corpi e capisce che vengono dal futuro per avvertirlo di non usare più la macchina, ma la macchina non può essere distrutta a causa di una arcana forza, nè tantomeno il laboratorio che la contiene. La morale della storia è quindi duplice: da un lato si tratta di un'esortazione a non sprecare il poco tempo che ci viene concesso, e dall'altro si ricorda che la morte arriva inesorabilmente per tutti. Chi segue la scena Death Metal avrà sicuramente osservato una forte somiglianza coi corpi presenti nella copertina di "The fathomless mastery" dei Bloodbath. Uno dei pochi disegni in forma ovale, "Gli insetti", narra invece di esseri per metà pupe bipedi di una farfalla e per metà stami di magnolia che si fondono alla perfezione il 23 settembre di ogni anno sulle coste oceaniche del pianeta Solaris. Uno di questi ha appena partorito quattro uova in un angolo remoto del giardino, ma esiste anche subito dopo un altro disegno che lo schematizza in tre parti usando lo scolastico color seppia. Di aspetto millenario, e partecipe alla creazione cosmogonica di soli e pianeti, "Il demiurgo' è una testa con sei paia di occhi che nutre esseri umani col proprio fluido nucleare, li riscalda con il fuoco che esce da un buco-vortice che ha sulla testa, e dà loro la sua intelligenza e forse la sua vita. Oltre al fuoco è fornita di un tubo che va a rifornire di energia due ampolle contenenti una donna ed un uomo svenuti che hanno delle teste irte di punte e delle braccia molto piccole e corte. Il disegno è di diffcile interpretazione e rimane uno dei più criptici e destinati a variegate esegesi, ma ha un alone di invecchiamento artificiale dato dal colore della carta. Le punte sulle teste appena viste sono molto simili a "La mandragora", pianta-radice dotata di due gambe e un paio di scarpe, particolare frequente nelle opere dell'artista sudamericano; essa è nata dal seme di un condannato a morte, e fugge per non essere uccisa. Infatti il brodo viola ottenuto dalla sua carne purifica il sangue dalle tossine, e la pianta cresce muta per non essere scoperta dai tanti suoi cacciatori, consapevole che la sua voce melodiosa (!) potrebbe rivelare la sua presenza. Anche qui, per la seconda volta, abbiamo a che fare con un disegno di forma ovale invece di quella rettangolare classica. Ancora una volta Albinus si trova di fronte una creatura bizzarra parecchie volte più grande di lui, che adora riprendere con una vecchia cinepresa dal suo giardino, "L'alebrije"; esso è nato da una serie di sogni sequenziali dopo una costante assunzione di stupefacenti, e per natura può essere piacevole od orrorifico. Difficile stabilire se quello che ha davanti sia pericoloso o meno, come pure se sia di sesso femminile o maschile; quel che è certo è che Romo ha espresso il massimo del suo talento in questo disegno. L'alebrije che appare qui è un po' mela, pesce, cavalletta, farfalla e un po' umano. La mela che compone il viso infatti ha una bocca vegetale con una schiera di denti affilati non rassicuranti, ma anche occhi strabici da essere umano, mento, baffi, naso e sopracciglia ed oltre alle zampe da cavalletta (rigorosamente provviste di scarpe), ha due braccia umane scheletriche che depositano con cura le uova che escono dal suo grembo. Solo ora il minuscolo Albinus coi suoi occhiali neri e la sua barba corta e folta si rivela essere Romo in persona dopo aver confrontato il disegno con la foto messa sul suo profilo Facebook. "Il lottatore Lorenzo, soprannominato L'incendiario" è l'ennesima creatura che popola il giardino incantato di Albinus/Romo. Ogni lottatore qui ha poteri sovrumani, psichici, levitativi, termici, eccetera. Lorenzo è dotato di una morsa potentissima e della capacità di emettere fuoco ed incenerire l'avversario, ma il disegno raffigura un lottatore con mani di fuoco che escono dalle sue ferite e pugni di fumo che lo circondano, appoggiato su una fornace accesa. Lorenzo è la fornace o il lottatore? E se fosse il lottatore non dovrebbe avere un vortice di fuoco anzichè tanti piccoli fuochi che escono dalla carne? In mezzo a questi dubbi con cui Romo adora farci scervellare rimangono le certezze delle sue peculiarità: il lottatore ha arti piccoli e corti e lo sfondo viene arricchito da rovi che danno bacche rosse già incontrati in precedenza. Uno dei disegni che appare in bianco e nero all'inizio del libro è proprio "Il mimoide", una delle tante creature che vivono nell'oceano Solaris che si è formato nel giardino dopo lo schianto di una cometa la cui anima di ghiaccio si è liquefatta. Il mimoide è parte stessa di Solaris, ed è uno dei vari metodi comunicativi di cui la massa d'acqua dispone. Ciò che colpisce è che il mimoide ha diverse radici e macchie rosse che in parte sono fuori dall'acqua ed in parte si diffondono sprofondando nel terreno. Vi prego di guardare con attenzione le onde dell'oceano per rendervi conto della lentezza del tocco, della precisione, e della dedizione dedicate da Romo alla loro realizzazione. La tecnica di Claudio si colloca decisamente agli antipodi delle caratteristiche chiave dell'impressionismo. L'oceano del giardino di Albinus è anche pieno di "Meduse giganti", che collegano le città sommerse dei tritoni con la superficie trasportando esseri viventi e merci sul dorso o nelle loro pance. Quella in oggetto trasporta uno strano pesce alato con braccia e gambe che porta legato a sè un pugnale risalendo da un fondale poco profondo (si vedono distintamente dei raggi, peraltro ottimamente disegnati, penetrare nell'acqua). "Gli ittio-sicari" sono pesci mercenari che avevanno sconfitto gli umani per conto dei tritoni e li avevano scacciati dall'oceano; adesso per i tritoni svolgono invece il ruolo di incubatori delle loro uova fino a deporle sulla misteriosa Isola Cefala. Nel disegno si vedono i figli uscire dalle uova portate dal pesce trasportato dalla medusa summenzionata e tornare nell'oceano, vigilati da un tritone adulto. Il disegno viene reso più interessante da vicine costruzioni arboree a cipolla simili a quelle dei cremlini russi, dai pugnali che l'ittio-sicario porta legati a una cintura e che sono decorati con teschi dei coloni umani sconfitti, e soprattutto da un pugnale brandito a mano su cui è incisa una R, di certo non una casualità! Essere noto fin dall'antichità, "Il Behemoth" è connesso alla coscienza di Dio, e quello che appare qui è dotato di tanti occhi - anche laterali - una pinna, un'ala di pipistrello, e zampe di cavalletta. Vola e mette in mostra il suo dorso formato da una montagna, il suo ano, i lunghi peli sulla parte bassa del corpo, ed infine la bocca priva di denti. Arriviamo poi alla famosa "Isola Cefala", un'isola con testa umana da donna che piange, le cui mani emergono dall'oceano. L'isola possiede strade, un piccolo molo a cui è legata una barca, e una cascata esce da un orecchio. La sua bocca contiene inquietanti denti e i capelli legati in crocchi laterali sono in realtà due città fondate sul cranio del titano marino, i cui abitanti sono tutti cartografi nautici inaffidabili, poichè i territori rappresentati assumono la forma di immaginarie bestie ibride. "Aurelia Australe" è invece il nome di una città levitante il cui ambiente è stato trasformato telepaticamente dagli abitanti, la coscienza dei quali è fusa da generazioni con quella delle piante. La città è così famosa che astronavi di umani ed alieni vengono a visitarla in continuazione per imparare i segreti della loro prosperità, della pace raggiunta attraverso la meditazione e la filosofia, e per trovare risposte a quesiti che non potrebbero mai avere sui loro pianeti di origine. Esiste un'antichissima e longeva razza aliena immortale che non ha bisogno di acqua, naviga esplorando l'universo incontrando razze aliene e ne genera di nuove mediante semi fertili nei luoghi oscuri del cosmo dove sono rimasti solo buchi neri o soli vetusti. Si tratta de "I cosmonauti", esseri provvisti di otto braccia e collegati a coppie da arterie in comune che trasmettono energie e concetti al cervello dell'altro. Questo è il disegno più legato allo stile del fumetto. Atanasius Uterinus è un pianeta che orbita in una nebulosa tra i milioni di "Nebulose" presenti nel giardino di Albinus; essa contiene un 'sole', in realtà un nucleo che riscalda il suo interno e che consente la vita in città sviluppatesi dentro alle sue caverne. 5 oceani sono inoltre chiaramente visibili nel disegno che accompagna la descrizione. Il penultimo disegno è corredato da una frase ripetuta nella copertina posteriore del libro, che descrive il suo giardino senza confini come frutto della sua vivida immaginazione, e che è collegato ad infiniti altri giardini, cioè menti, ed una di queste è speculare alla sua, concetto espresso con una clessidra, da cui si capisce che il giardino dell'immaginazione appartiene a Romo e non a Dio. L'ultimo disegno è un autoritratto stilizzato (in cui la testa di Romo è racchiusa in uno scafandro il cui vetro è stato finemente realizzato dalle mani dell'illustratore) giustamente seguito dalla sua autobiografia. Questo breve libro rappresenta per me una felice scoperta di un artista mai sentito prima di cui voglio approfondire la conoscenza delle altre opere al più presto.

	ENGLISH VERSION: An applause to Logos Edizioni that kindly sent me a promo copy to write a review about the eleventh book from Chilean author and illustrator Claudio Andrés Salvador Francisco Romo Torres, the second for Modena's small indie publishing company. Romo has also been a drawing, engraving, illustration and image telling teacher at Chile's Concepcion's university since 1997. The new literary effort came out in 2016 in a format slightly smaller than A4, it's in colour, with a stiff cover, and even by only giving a look at the front and back of the cover or glancing at the inner pictures one immediately understands that Romo is strongly in debt not only to Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Francisco Coloane, but also to the style of Hyeronimus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer and all the bestial medieval imagery, as well as contemporary authors such as Hornst Janssen, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Otto Dix, German expressionists, comic illustrators Enrique, Alberto and Patricia Breccia and Moebius; with the world of extreme Metal covers and artworks parallelisms with Nuclear Death's artworks and similar bands' pop out from my mind. While the author used a white pencil on a black background for the inner drawings, for the outer ones - all different except four - Romo utilized pastel and watercolours in a sublime and hugely detailed way, adding only the previously computer-drawn rays and the title in the cover. All the rest remains rigororously analogic, that is handmade. The tale accompanying the reader, translated by Federico Taibi, is the one of an unspecified entity called Apparitio Albinus, who owns a garden populated by spirits of hybrid animal-vegetal-mechanical creatures. The first drawing, "The source", depicts a miraculous chalice allowing those who dive into it to rejuvanate; yet unfortunately, a jealous god turns people getting out of the chalice into vegetal mutants, for instance a woman with a rose instead of her head. The flasks, of which one gifted with paws like many other objects present in the next pages, and the chalice contain a grave perspective mistake well visible in the incorrect ellipses which is partly forgiven thanks to the marvellous array of nuances and a choice of colours like azure, green and orange in tones which always strike the beholder's eye. Moreover, it must be mentioned the remarkable patience lavished to define with the pencil the motifs present on the chalice, and the bricks of the cylindrical furnace on the right. "The giant automaton" is the following drawing, in which you see a mastodontic robot armed in an Arab manner, which left the Muslim army it was enrolled with because tired of violence and innocent victims on account of fire weapons. Therefore it's about a machine having feelings, and consequently owns without explanations an unexpected human side. It prays Allah to be pitiful to him, and has decided to become a bird shelter inside Albinus's serene Mediterranean garden, kissed by a sunset or dawn. We can only guess that Albinus is the tiny man placed on the low right side of the drawing observing the robot. Introduced by a brief passage written by William Blake, the third drawing titled "The ovens with deep roots" stands out, displaying giant ovens made of bricks with vaguely human faces, arms starting from their necks branding scimitars, and placed on hills constituting their own bodies, which are nothing but a set of cemetaries supplied with smoking chimneys; people get into them, they go down until they reach their loculi waiting for them with their names already engraved. Terrifically appreciable are the pupils made of skulls, whereas the dry branches filling the scenery have the additional function of separating the monstruous stoves. "The phantasmagorical machine" regards a camerasupplied with an eye globe and cables projecting the image of a friend grown deformed owing to prolonged exposure. In time Albinus and his friend have understood that the photos stole a person's soul and flesh, reducing bodies to ectoplasmatic matter and actually leading them to death. Two aspects to notice are that despite the fact that the friend's consistency is by now only ethereal, his hearts and veins are still clearly visible, and secondly that the friend has an excrescence on his head similar to a trton's crest; such a motif is fairly recurrent in several drawings in the pages to come. On the trail of Fremens in the deserted planet Arrakis, "The mechanical arachnids" sees as protagonists some very small men divided by religion and in particular by the myths of creation, further differentiated into nomad clans living on mobile city-states, which are nothing but the iron spiders themselves that they use to hunt. Around them everything is gigantic, and even the mushrooms and the grass are taller than the spiders. Just as the title suggests, "Flavia, the writing gynoid", portrays a female-looking automaton writing books about the stories of the civilties she used to live by, all gone by now. She was planned to build a mechanical humanity devoid of monotheisms, even if we have to state precisely that she belonged to the Mayans for some time, and the Mayans, like all pre-Columbian civilties were well-known to be politheists. Once again praise needs to be given to the patience of Job had to sketch the rose-garden behind the gynoid, but also to the feathers stuck into its headgear, as well as the two skulls in the library, one alien and one humanoid. But the masterpiece of the album is in my opinion "The time machine", a chronoship conceived to explore the mysteries of matter and the future of its builder's existence, which in the end finishes by letting 7 naked corpses out (and not eight as stated in the translation). The constructor recognizes himself in thise old bodies and deduces they come from the future to warn him not to use the machine anymore, notwithstanding the machine can't be destroyed because of an arcane power, least of all the lab containing it. The morale is thus dual: on one hand it deals with an exhortation not to waste the little time granted, on the other hand it is reminded that death arrives inexorably for everybody. Those following Death Metal must have noticed for sure a strong similarity to the bodies appearing in the cover of Bloodbath's "The fathomless mastery". One of the few drawings in an oval shape, "The insects", tells, instead, about beings which are halfway between two-footed pupae of a butterfly and magnolia stamens blending each other to perfection on 23 September every year on the oceanic coasts of the planet Solaris. One of them has just laid four eggs in a remote corner of the garden, and there is also another drawing immediately after that schematizes it in three parts using the classical sepia colour. Millenary-looking and taking part in the cosmogonic creation of suns and planets, "The demiurge" is a head with six pairs of eys feeding human beings with its nuclear fluid, warming them with fire coming out of a hole-vortex it has on its head, gives them intelligence and maybe its life. In addition to the fire it's supplied with a tube providing with energy two conical flasks containing a man and a woman, both unconscious; their heads are bristling with points and they have very short and small arms. It is hard to interpret the drawing, being one of the most cryptic ones and bound to various exegeses, and it has an aura of artificial ageing given by the colour of the paper chosen. The points on the head we've just seen are conspicously similar to "The mandrake", a two-footed plant.root with a pair of shoes, particular frequent in the south-American artist's opera; it was born from the seed of a condemned person, and flees not to be killed. Actually, the violet broth obtained by its meat purifies blood from toxins, and the plant grows mute not to be found out by its many hunters, aware that its melodious voice (!) might reveal its presence. Here again, for the second time, we are in front of an oval drawing instaed of the typical rectangular one. Once again Albinus is facing a bizarre creature several times bigger than him; he is shooting it with an old film camera from his garden; it's "The alebrije", born of a series of sequencial dreams after strong consumption of drugs, and by nature it can be pleasant or nightmarish. Difficult to say if the one he's confronting is dangerous or not, as well as if it's male or female; what's for sure is that Romo expressed the best of his talent in this drawing. The alebrije showing up here is partly an apple, fish, grasshopper, butterfly and a bit human. The apple composing its face has in fact a vegetal mouth with an array of sharp unreassuring teeth, as well as human cross-eyed eyes, chin, moustache, nose and eyebrows besides the grasshopper's paws (of course wearing shoes); it also has two human skeletal arms carefully laying the eggs that come out of its womb. Only now the tiny Albinus with its black glasses and short thick beard reveals himself to be Romo himself after confronting the drawing with the photo he posted on his Facebook account. "The wrestler Lawrence, called 'The incendiary'" is the nth living thing populating Albinus/Romo's enchanted garden. Every wrestler in this place has inhuman powers (psychic, levitating, thermal, etc.). Lawrence can count on an inordinately powerful grip and capacities to spread fire and incinirate the adversary, but the drawing reproduces a wrestler where fire hands come out of its wounds and smoke fists surrounding him, leaned on an active furnace. Is he the furnace or the wrestler? And if he were the wrestler shouldn't he have a fire vortex rather than many small flames exiting his flesh? In the middle of these riddles that Romo likes to rack our brains with, we're left with the certainty of his pecularities: the fighter has short and small limbs and the background is enriched with briers giving fruit to red berries as already shown previously. One of the drawings that appears in black and white at the beginning of the book is "The mimoid", one of the countless beasts living in Solaris which formed in the garden after the crash of a comet whose ice core melted. The mimoid is part of Solaris itself, and it's one of the numerous communicative methods the water mass has at its disposal. What makes a deep impression on me is that the mimoid has multiple roots and red spots that are partially out of the water and partially spread sinking into the ground. I urge you to look attentively at the waves of the ocean to realize how much stroke slowness, precision, and commitment Romo had to dedicate to their carrying out. Claudio's techinque is decidedly at the antipodes to the key characteristics of impressionism. The ocean of Albinus' s garden is also full of "Giant medusae" connecting tritons' submerged cities with the surface carrying living creatures and goods on their backs or in their bellies. The one in hand is carrying a strange winged fish with arms and legs, which is in turn carrying a dagger under its belt while leaving shallow water (you can plainly see rays, what's more brilliantly drawn, penetrating the water). ("The ichtyo-hitmen" are mercenary fish which had defeated mankind and banned them from the ocean on account of the tritons; now they work for the trtons as incubators of their eggs until they lay them on the mysterious Human Head Island. In the drawing the tritons' babies can be seen exiting the eggs brought by the gish carried by the above-mentioned medusa, and going back to the ocean, under the surveillance of an adult triton. The picture is made more interesting by near arboreous onion-like manufacture similar to Russian kremlins, and also by the daggers that the ichtyo-hitman brings tied under a belt and which are decorated with skulls of the beaten human colonizers, and most of all by a dagger brandished by hand on which an R letter is encarved, not a coincidence for sure! Being known since ancient times, "The behemoth" is connected with God's concience, and the one that comes into sight her is fitted out with a good deal of eyes - also lateral ones - a fin, a bat's wing, and locust's paws. It's flying and showing up its back formed by a mountain, its anus, its long hairs on the lower side of its body, and finally a toothless mouth. Then we get to the well-known "Human Head Island", an island made by the head of a crying woman, whose hands emerge from the ocean. This land surrounded by a body of water has roads, a small pier a boat is tied at, and a waterfall that comes out of an ear. Its mouth contains disquieting teeth and the hair tied in side knots are in fact two cities founded on the sea titan's skull, whose inhabitants are all untrustworthy nautical cartographers, as the depicted territories assume the shape of imaginary hybrid animals. "Aurelia Australis" is instead the name of a levitating city whose environment has been telepathically transformed by its inhabitants, who have had their conscience merged with plants' for generations. The city is so popular that human and alien spacecrafts keep visting it to learn the secrets of its prosperity, the peace reached through meditation and philosophy, and to find answers to questions that they might never have received on their planets of origin. There exists a very ancient and long-lived immortal alien race that needs no water, navigates exploring the universe meeting alien races and generationg new ones by fertile seeds in dark places of the cosmos where only black holes or old suns are left. It's "The cosmonauts", creatures with 8 arms conneted in pairs by arteries in common conveying energies and concepts to each other's brain. This is the drawing closer to comic style. Atanasius Uterinus is a planet orbiting in a nebula among the millions of nebulae present in teh garden of Albinus; it contains a 'sun', as a matter of fact a core heating its inside, which allows life in cities developed in its caves. Moreover, 5 oceans are evidently seeable in the drawing accompanying the description. The penultimate depiction is attached by a sentence repeated on the back cover of the book, recounting his garden without borders as a fruit of its vivid imagination, and which is linked up with infinite gardens more, that is minds, and one of these is mirroring his; the concept is expressed by a sand-glass, from which we guess that the eden of fantasy belongs to Romo and not God. The last drawing trace is a stylized self-portrait (in which Romo's head is contained in a diving suit whose glass was accurately rendered by the illustrator's hands) justly followed by his autobiography. This short book represents for me a happy discovery of an artist I'd never heard of before, of whom I want to further my knowledge of his other opera at the soonest. MARKUS GANZHERRLICH AND DAUGHTER - 20th June 2019
	Contacts: Logos Edizioni - Modena (Italy) Official site: https://www.facebook.com/logosedizioni/ Claudio Romo - Concepcion (Chile) Official site: https://www.facebook.com/ClaudioRomoTorres/?__tn__=%2Cd%2CP-R&eid=ARDhTAGJDoIpong8aqqXLjaYidNF7SvAF-CNTZd5n9cYqQPgrX2leiJ7k3eJbQ1Neq-gcDgNCu3VQqxe